The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  Admiral Adler shoved the agent violently back into the chair. “You know what?” he said. “If you don’t come up with real information the next time I see you, I’m going to give you back to Dr. Baum.”

  There were thirty-two days left.

  15

  February–March 1976

  When all the guests had left what she laughingly called “the party for Kranak,” Teel instructed Chelito to stiff Kranak every time he called: “Just tell him Miss Teel is too busy to come to the telephone.”

  It took Kranak four days of working on himself before he could bring himself to call her; he knew what he wanted from her and he didn’t approve of it. He was a Lipan Apache. Suppose—just suppose, he told himself—the woman got so crazy in love with him that she decided to have a baby by him. How could he ever face the memory of his mother—which incorporated for him the historical meaning of his tribe—if he had cooperated in making a black or half-black Lipan? It would be the world’s most shameful anomaly. A Lipan Apache was the proudest and individually most unique thing a human being could be. What was a nigger? A nigger was exactly the opposite. The Lipans were at the top of the anthropological ladder. The niggers weren’t even on the ladder. But, Jesus! Whenever he thought of her standing between the Secretary of State and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in that lavender dress and all those jewels he got a hard-on he’d have to close a window on to get rid of.

  In cities Kranak always lived naked if indoors, winter and summer. He was a man. He would stand in front of his full-length mirror and study every inch of himself on view and he could do it for a half hour at a time and then do it again if he happened to be walking by the mirror. “Where is she ever going to find a man like this?” he asked himself aloud more than once.

  He was five feet ten inches tall, not tall for a nigger basketball player, but he wasn’t a nigger basketball player, he was a Lipan Apache—and that was tall for a Lipan. He had strong, well-proportioned shoulders, a very deep chest and long, thin muscular arms that never tired. His forehead was very broad; maybe broader than high, but he was a fighting man, not a school teacher. His mouth was enormous and garnished with strong, white teeth under a magnificent nose. His mother had said that no men anywhere had such noses as Lipan chiefs. The nostrils pulsated with every emotion. He quiffled them in and out as he stared at the mirror. He was fearless, he had always been fearless, he would always be fearless. His tribal name was Janamata which meant Red Buffalo. He was Lipan! He had enormous sexual powers! He had deep wisdom! His mother had taught him, “Inday pindah lickoyee poohacante”: “The people of the white eyes are wonderful medicine men.” It was a matter of historical record—the cunning of the Lipan is only equalled by his skill and his audacity. A Lipan was trained from infancy to regard all other people as his natural enemies and to understand that the chief excellence of man lies in outwitting his fellows. Lipans had many, many wives because no woman was able to resist them.

  She would be pleading with him very soon! For his brain strength! For his beyond-the-credible sexuality. Look at the size of that head! Look at the determination of that chin! The eyes might be somewhat small but they were exceedingly brilliant. What had happened to the days when a man could know where he stood with a woman, without all this coquetry of having some person say she was “too busy” to come to the telephone? The days when a man would stake his horse in front of a woman’s roost and walk away to await the issue? If the woman wanted him—as he knew this black woman wanted him—she would come out after two days and take the horse to be watered, fed, and secured in front of his lodge or she would ignore the horse. At the end of four days the whole thing would be decided one way or the other. He had been calling this black woman sometimes twice a night for almost five weeks, so her actions had become an excess of coquetry. He had sent her flowers. He had sent her the perfume he liked. He had even sent her a Polaroid camera so she could send him pictures of herself, he had sent her some pictures of himself, stripped to the waist with his chest at maximum expansion, but all he had gotten in return was “too busy to come to the phone.”

  He decided that it did not matter that she was black (but he wished, in his heart, that he didn’t know her black, black brother). She was a woman; a woman who commanded the respect and attention of really great men even if she were a square who had no idea she had a revolutionary for a brother. It was okay, he told himself—and what a pair of tits! With a whinny of frustration he grabbed the telephone and dialed Teel’s number for the third time that night.

  “Miss Teel, please.”

  “This is Miss Teel.”

  “What? Miss Teel?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Chandler Shapiro. Chandler Shapiro? The friend of your brother’s?”

  “Oooh, the Indian!”

  “That’s right.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Shapiro?”

  “Are you free for dinner?”

  “Dinner? It’s a quarter to twelve.”

  “Is it? Well, we could have like a fashionable dinner.”

  Teel had watched him take charge for four years in every weekly report she received from China. She had chosen him for the top operational command over all of them because he was a killer, a wrecker, and a people hater. The kind of revolution she was going to make would need all the monsters like that that she could draw into it—but this one was a superlatively trained monster. He was raw prejudice, amorality, brutality and criminal instinct; unilaterally motivated. What she had to find out—since he was the best of all the worst she was seeking—was if she could control him outside theoretical conditions; if she, as the Supreme Leader, would be able to force him to do everything the way she wanted it done when the actual operations got under way—or was he uncontrollable. She knew she would never find that out in a drawing room, so she decided to invite him into her bed to provoke him into whatever unguarded madnesses she could find for him there, then cut him down until she knew she could control him.

  “Well, no dinner, I think,” she said into the telephone. “But why don’t you come over and let me read your palm or something?”

  They locked in that night. It got better. Then it got better than that until Teel began to worry that it was interfering with Kranak’s work because she knew it was beginning to interfere with her own.

  In between all the fucking she talked to him in a faintly derisive way. That was how she read him. She gauged him as preferring to be mocked and, with skill, belittled by women.

  “Were you a poor Indian, Shapiro?” she would ask him.

  “Until I was fourteen we were very, very poor. All we had was the strength of my mother’s tremendous pride that we were Lipan Apaches and not ordinary people, but I don’t think I really had enough to eat until I was fourteen.”

  “What happened then? Did your mother shoot a buffalo?”

  “My father owned a few thousand acres of desert property. They found uranium on it, I think.”

  “You think?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it was oil.”

  She decided to test him. “Is Shapiro an Indian name?”

  “No.”

  “Your father was not an Indian?”

  “He took the name because it is a paleface name. There were a lot of names he could have taken, I suppose—like Vanderbilt, or Astor or Edison—but he took Shapiro.”

  “Are you rich, Shapiro?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kranak said with pride. “I am very rich. Are you rich, Teel?”

  “Well, you know,” she said, “I’m a lawyer. We do all right.”

  He thought she thought he was the general manager of an export business. He thought she was merely a big-time lawyer and a power broker. Teel was beginning to feel hooked because she could not continue her life as a female in a male role without losing a few spangles. She could have been a lawyer, any kind of lawyer; she might even have been able to live as a politician and still maintain her balance as a female. What tipped the scales and made her vuln
erable was her attempt to carry out both of those roles plus the obsessive guise as Attila the Hun. Not that she “fell in love” like other females. She merely opened her spirit and agreed with herself to take on one more character: the loving and submissive mate to the man who was her lackey and her inferior in every way, particularly in scope, grasp, purpose (negative and positive) and vision. The female of the black widow spider undoubtedly has her softened moments which resembled Teel’s. Then the male seems to contravene what the female believes she was put in place to accomplish and she widows herself with or without regret. Parting is sweet sorrow if there be power at hand when comes the morrow.

  Kranak was a mess about the affair. He tried every ruse that occurred to his savage mind to dominate her. He became genuinely agitated and could fall into tantrums that seemed epileptic. He tried to crowd her, bully her. Once, he struck her and she broke the wrist of the hand that had hit her across the corner of a marble coffee table, turning it on its back and dropping all her weight on its elbow. While he whimpered, she told him she was throwing him out and nothing could get him back in. He began to whine. She said, “What kind of a Lipan Apache are you, Shapiro? You’re afraid of pain and you’re afraid to go without one woman. You’re just shit, Shapiro. You and your mother and that Lipan Apache talk are all just a lot of shit.” He mewed until she forgave him and let him go out to find a doctor. She had no respect for him except as a stud but while she could—as long as it was convenient—she clung to him.

  16

  April–May 1976

  Enid Simms watched the romance happen, then grow. She watched through thick brick walls. Teel and Kranak were never seen together outside the house on 38th Street. They weren’t like other lovers who went to restaurants or walked in parks. They stayed inside Teel’s house and thought they were invisible, but Enid followed Kranak whenever she could. It was the only way she could be with him.

  When Kranak could be with Teel as often as she would let him in, Enid became ill. She couldn’t eat and she couldn’t work. Enrique Jorge Molina was assigned to take over her department as a trained Freedom Fighter. Colonel Pikow sent three different doctors to see her. Two of them told Pikow she was very ill but that they didn’t know what made her ill. One of them said it was his “general feeling” that Enid was dying, but he could not say why unless it was The Victorian Disease, a broken heart.

  As a candidate for the presidential nomination Bart was able to persuade a great diagnostician from the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to examine her in New York. The doctor said Enid’s infection was deep within her mind.

  Bart was campaigning hard. His national organization equalled the size of other candidates’ campaign forces at the pre-election point. For the past seventy-eight days unsolicited money had been pouring in from all fifty states in one-hundred-, five-hundred-, and thousand-dollar bills, every contribution with a letter urging Bart to run, every letter mailed by the well-dispersed families who were a part of Mr. Palladino’s interlocking national organization. Bart’s fixed priorities were fully financed and more. The budget he carried in his wallet showed these appropriations:

  DEPARTMENT

  BUDGET

  Administration

  $317,000.

  (Office) Administration

  602,000.

  Advertising

  15,750,000.

  Campaign Materials

  1,700,000.

  Citizens’ Committees

  4,800,000.

  Political & State Support (Including “Research” Fees)

  11,000,000.

  Polling

  1,250,000.

  PR/Media “Assistance”

  950,000.

  Other Candidate Surveillance

  1,400,000.

  Direct Mail

  2,900,000.

  Telephone Campaigning

  9,000,000.

  Women, Minorities, Special Groups

  3,500,000.

  Speaker’s Bureau

  840,000.

  Travel & Maintenance

  1,200,000.

  $55,209,000.

  Bart was running a dual campaign. Simultaneous with the intensive preconvention campaign going on in the fifty states, there was a concentration on the crucial-state strategy, which emphasized activities in: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, California, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, New Jersey and Connecticut. All states were covered by television advertising, but the crucial states got an additional budget. All states were serviced by the Speakers’ Bureau but the crucial states were saturated by it. The crucial states had telephone centers from which as many as seven and a quarter million households were called at an average cost of 16 cents a call. By late May Bart’s prospects began to look as if they were unbeatable and he ordered a shift to a fifty-state strategy, sighting the target of a fifty-delegation sweep of the convention for a unanimous nomination on the first ballot. The “research money” he had spread among the State Chairmen and key delegates was definitely paying off. But he continued to run scared and spend hard because even when the polls showed him far ahead of the nearest contender, a percentage of undecided delegates was shown. So Bart Simms had to proceed with the startling understanding that there were some politicians and delegates who could not be bought, a factor that had shaken other politicians before him. He made a big point of having his support designed so that it was divided between Anti-War and Hawks/Hard Liners on the upcoming war (wherever it was decided that would be set), so that he could appear to be uniting both extreme wings of the party and could, after election, move in either direction without seriously dislocating public opinion. He kept his own positions on such controversial matters entirely silent. He concentrated on endorsing the verities. Mother’s Day, for one example, had never been celebrated as his candidacy celebrated it late in May 1976.

  He spoke to Enid on the phone twice a day from whatever part of the country his organization had sent him to. He could never reach her at night. She was never there at night. His first schedule break was over the Memorial Day weekend, essentially a warmaker’s celebration. He was able to get back to New York to be with her. Enid looked ghastly.

  “Now, Enid, listen to me,” he said desperately. “You can’t go on like this. The doctors say you have to rest but you are never here at night—and don’t say you are here because—”

  “I couldn’t get interested in lying, Bart. Not to you.”

  “Well, anyway, dammit—where do you go?”

  “I am living inside a Victorian novel,” she said slowly. “A real weeper. I follow my lover just to be near him.” She laughed bitterly. “It’s true. I follow my lover every night, then when he goes inside to make love to his mistress, I stand out there, even if it’s raining, and torture myself with imagining what they are doing together. I do, Bart.”

  “But—”

  “Everything is very real now. Daddy has come back. Sometimes when I follow this man I cannot have, I see, as he moves under a street light or past a store front, that he is Daddy and that he wants me to die. It is so real to me that at last I understand why Daddy killed himself. He did it to make me die.”

  “Who is he?” Bart was holding his sister’s upper arms tightly.

  “You met him. I pretended to him that I had told you all about him.”

  “Who?”

  “Kranak. That unpleasant man at the black lawyer’s party.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He was in China.” Enid was livelier—lifelier—because she was talking about Kranak.

  “Did he take you into China?”

  “No.”

  “Who did? I have to know who did that, who tore us apart for every day of the rest of our lives!”

  “The people who are going to make you President.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “The agency. The CIA. Anything that ever happened to us they did. Only they could have taken me out of Hong Kong. They knew I was in Hong Kong and they
had all the necessary power to take me out because of all the Chinese they brought opium to in Taiwan.”

  “That isn’t true! That cannot be true!”

  “What is the difference now, Bart dearest. I am dying inside a Victorian novel.”

  He stayed with her for the three days. He went with her when she followed Kranak to Teel’s house. He stood with her through the dark, cold hours as she looked up at the high windows of the house, sometimes speaking to him but most often not.

  Sunday afternoon at four fifteen he told her he had to keep a political appointment. He went to Kranak’s apartment, which was far east on 57th Street.

  Kranak’s apartment was messy. Kranak was wearing a blue towel robe over his usually naked body out of deference to the conventions of hospitality. He was barefoot. He invited Bart to sit down.

  Bart remained standing, “My sister—you do remember my sister?” It was an agony for Bart to discuss Enid with this ruffian.

  “Enid? Yeah. You bet.” Kranak was wary. He didn’t want to offend this man. He needed to stay real close to this man. They had to get along or maybe he’d be thrown right out some window, Gr-1’d.

  “She’s in love with you.”

  Kranak shrugged, then grinned with self-gratification. It was such an unkind grin that Bart decided he was going to hurt this animal before he left it here. Bart made himself continue.